Scotland Accident and Emergency

The A&E datamart was established in June 2007 to monitor the compliance of each NHS Board against the 4 hour wait standard. In July 2010 the A&E data mart was extended further to collect items such as diagnosis, several injury fields and an alcohol involved flag, which will be used to identify whether the patient’s alcohol consumption was a factor in the attendance. The collection of the new fields has been driven by a variety of SG policy decisions and interest from a number of organisations. Although there is now the facility to submit these additional fields, completeness and quality of the data is generally poor and further development is needed to improve it. There are two types of data submitted to the A&E datamart: episode and aggregate level data. All hospitals with Emergency Departments submit episode level data containing a detailed record for each patient attendance. Some smaller sites with minor injury units or community hospitals only submit aggregate files containing monthly summary attendance and compliance figures only. This is because they do not have the information systems and support to enable collection of detailed patient based information. Sites that submit episode level data account for around 97% of all attendances at A&E. This linked version of the dataset includes only A&E data submitted at episode level. Additional items are included to enable further analysis: chronic conditions flags, based on historic hospital admissions data; a care home flag derived from the CHI database